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World Court to Investigate Darfur Violence

THE HAGUE, June 6 - Prosecutors for the International Criminal Court announced Monday that they had begun an investigation into war crimes in Sudan, opening the door for indictments and warrants for those considered most responsible for the ethnic violence and starvation that has exterminated hundreds of villages in Darfur.

But the Sudanese government, blamed by a United Nations inquiry for much of the violence, has said it will not accept the court's jurisdiction. It has already begun to try to delay legal action by using some of the safeguards built into the court's rules, like insisting that it is conducting its own investigations and will hold its own trials.

The government has recently hired lawyers from Britain and Kenya to advise it and to start domestic trials, according to diplomats and court officials. "There are a number of things they can do," one lawyer at the court here said. "Khartoum officials cannot stop the process, but they can stall and buy time, even if eventually they will have to cooperate."

The Security Council requested in March that the court take up the atrocities in Darfur, where tens of thousands have been starved to death, raped and killed over the past two years. Now that prosecutors have taken jurisdiction, they say, they hope to move quickly.

The court's investigators have already worked in the region for the past two months. They have interviewed diplomats and witnesses in refugee camps in Chad. They also have aerial photography documenting destruction.

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The chief prosecutor said Monday that his office had interviewed more than "50 independent experts" and collected "thousands of documents."

When the International Criminal Court, the world's first permanent criminal tribunal for war crimes, was set up by the Rome Treaty of 1998, a number of safeguards and restrictions were adopted, largely at the request of the United States. One is that prosecutors can act only after a government shows itself unwilling or unable to conduct credible trials in its own courts.

If Sudan goes through with its own trials, international prosecutors would be forced to take time to show that those trials were not credible. Proceedings would be delayed further if they have to prove a government cover-up or that officials were shielding crucial suspects.